Compare the symbolism in "The Story of an Hour" and "A Rose for Emily."

In "A Rose for Emily," Emily's father is a symbol of patriarchal oppression. He won't allow her to marry and keeps her more or less entombed with him in the family home. In "The Story of an Hour," Louise's husband is similarly a symbol of patriarchal oppression. He is kinder and less controlling than Mr. Grierson, but Louise is nevertheless constrained and repressed by her need to defer to him. Neither woman can operate freely.

A key difference, however, is that when Louise's symbol of oppression dies, she quickly realizes she is liberated to live her own life. Understanding this fills Louise with joy. She thinks "free, free, free!" She understands the positive implications of her situation.

In contrast, even after her father dies, Emily remains imprisoned. She could make the decision to break free of the past, but she doesn't appear to realize this is possible. Even after she meets Homer Barron, with whom she might have been able to run off and start over somewhere else, she can't bring herself to leave her birthplace. Further, rather than letting Homer go free, she kills him, making him as much a symbol of stasis and death as she is.

"The Story of an Hour" is a much shorter and simpler story than "A Rose for Emily." Emily is imprisoned not only by her father but by the entire town, which seems to need her to exist for them as a symbol of a past they want to romanticize as more genteel than the present day.

What common theme and narrative do "A Rose for Emily" and "The Story of an Hour" share?

Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" are stories which share many similarities in terms of narrative and theme. They are both similar in terms of form and genre, being short stories, but the similarities go much deeper than this. We might consider the facts that:

1. Both stories have a female protagonist, in the forms of Emily and Mrs Mallard.

2. In both stories, the death of a man features significantly.

3. In both stories, too, there is a strong sense that the woman in question is suppressed and controlled by the presence of the men in her life, to the extent that each woman develops an unusual outlook on the deaths of the men they ostensibly love.

Looking at this theme—that of female suppression by men—more closely, we can draw out more similarities between the criticisms Faulkner and Chopin are making.

In the case of Emily, she has been controlled by men throughout her life. In her youth, she was controlled by her father, who felt that the family was so far above everybody else in the town that he prevented Emily from marrying any of her suitors. When Emily's father dies, her relationship with him is so conflicted that she does not want to let his body out of the house—she has felt safe in his controlling presence, even while, to an extent, it has inhibited her from living her own life.

She then becomes infatuated with Homer Barron, but he does not want to give her what she wants, either—he does not seem to want to marry her. As a result, it is suggested, she kills him—it is as if she is so unwilling to have the course of her life set once again by men that she frees herself in the only way she knows how: by causing his death. However, this doesn't mean she doesn't love him—the fact that she keeps his body as it decays and sleeps alongside it for decades would seem to imply the opposite. It is only that while he is alive, she cannot be free.

We see a similar theme emerge in Mrs Mallard. Mrs Mallard believes, at the beginning of the story, that she loves her husband. When she hears that he has been killed, she is devastated. However, the more she thinks about things, the more she realizes that actually, in his death, she is freer than she has ever been. She begins to understand that she can now live her own life without him controlling it.

As such, her reaction to the revelation that he is not dead after all is a highly unusual one. The doctor suggests she has died of joy, but the narrative implies that she has actually died of a broken heart, her dreams having been crushed and her freedom once again destroyed. Chopin does not suggest that Mrs Mallard does not love her husband, but simply that the love between men and women can often result in the stifling of those women.

In both cases, then, the women in these stories see the deaths of the men in their lives as the only possible avenue toward their own freedom, even while they love these men. The stories criticize the tendency of men in society to control the narrative of women's lives and suggest that this warps the ways in which women react to men.

What similarities between "A Rose for Emily" and "The Story of an Hour" suggest a common thesis?

It is much easier to come up with a thesis statement once there is an actual argument to be made. The best thing to do is to first decide what commonality between "A Rose for Emily" and "The Story of an Hour" the paper will explore.

Examining the two stories side by side, they do share a few elements, the strongest being in their protagonists. Both are centered around a repressed woman: Emily is unable to embrace modernity, and Louise has lived as an existential prisoner within her comfortable but unfulfilling marriage. Society has kept both of these women from going out into the world. Emily is so indoctrinated into the Old South's aristocratic views of female subservience and class privilege that she is unable to free herself from her past, while Louise conforms to the Victorian model of the submissive wife despite not being pleased with this role. Of course, a key difference between the two is that Emily becomes aggressive in trying to control others, such as Homer Barron or the town officials who want her to pay taxes, while Louise dies the moment her husband's return challenges her newfound liberation, but the core similarities are still there.

A thesis statement based on this subject would make an argumentative claim on the similarities between these two women. This thesis might focus on how both are oppressed by their society or suffer from patriarchal norms. The point is to make clear what this similarity is, then to argue for it in the body paragraphs of the essay.